Quick Start R

Interested in learning R? Here are some suggestions to get you up and running quickly:

1. Read and Share the New York Times article with friends and family. You can find it here: “Data Analysts Captivated by R’s Power“. (This article will give those close to you some insight into your new hobby/obsession/religion). The article is a bit dated ( there are now about 4000 packages available on CRAN compared with the 1600 mentioned in the article. To get some sense of R’s rising popularity, you can also check out The Popularity of data Analysis software article on r4stats.com )

3. Install Rstudio (also open source and free). This tool will make your R Life so much more pleasant. Begin your R experimentation now!

4. (optional) My friend from the artfulanalysis.com website gave me sound, useful advice to purchase “R in Action, Data Analysis and Graphics with R” by Robert I. Kabacoff . The book has proven to be an invaluable resource. You will not regret working through the examples in the book. There are many free resources availbale fro learning R online.

5. Participate in Roger Peng’s FREE intro to R course titled “Computing for Data Analysis” at coursera. Alternatively, you can just watch the course videos. Revolution Analytics has a nice summary page here.

6. Check out R-bloggers.com website daily. As stated in their ABout page, “R-Bloggers.com is a central hub (of content collected from bloggers who write about R (in English).” You will be simply amazed at the problems being solved with R.